Category Archives: News

When I started my campaign in Brooklyn, New York, I’ve attracted a wide array of supporters from older retired teachers to Russian-American immigrants. One of my favorite supporters was a young gentleman who made his living dealing marijuana. He was young, ambitious, thoughtful man who wanted a better life for his family. He talked about not having enough food at home and he thought this was the best option to provide for himself.

Alexis Krase is one of 40 New York–based entrepreneurs who have raised some $280,000 in capital using “WE Fund: Crowd,” a city initiative designed to champion women business owners. Any woman in New York can apply for a zero-interest loan of up to $10,000 on this Kiva crowdfunding page, and the city will fund the first 10 percent of the money she needs — lending with no fees, no interest, and no minimum credit score. Mayor Bill de Blasio has said the $3 million program aims to reach 500 women over the next three years.

Krase, who owns the Williamsburg plus-size boutique Plus Bklyn, has been cast as a model example of the program’s benefits. Hoping to design her own clothing line, she struggled to find a loan through a bank. But on “We Fund: Crowd,” she raised $10,000 in about two weeks, which allowed her to meet with a local patternmaker and begin designing a collection of colorful print dresses and basics in sizes up to 5x. “This money is everything. It is funding my dreams,” she told the Cut. “I’m hoping it will catapult our small business to a place where we can potentially produce clothing at a national scale.”

“Now that I do have money in my bank account, I want to help kids with a background similar to mine to get smart about their money,” 21 said in a statement to the publication. The Atlanta rapper also graced the first cover of Montreal luxury and streetwear retail magazine SSENSE, in which he talked about hanging up the jewelry to buy real estate and “stocks and sh*t.”

“The richest people I’ve ever met didn’t have jewelry. I ain’t wearing no jewelry because I want to be rich! At first, motherf**kers do sh*t because they ain’t ever had nothing,” he told SSENSE. “A lot of these ni**as be having more jewelry than money in their bank account. I ain’t like that.”

Savage just announced a North American tour with Post Malone and SOB x RBE starting April 26 in Portland, Oregon.

“Women-only pitch competitions was an eye-opener for me. It had a completely different feel than other pitch competitions that I have seen in the past,” said participating judge, Busayo Odunlami, the Chief Operating Officer at Venture Smarter.

“After reading these business plans,” Ebonique Ellis, co-founder of GOOD said at the event,

Judges

“I am positive that the future of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies reside in this room.” The event had founders of OuiShave, Sukoon Active, and LuxLock in attendance. However, the judges selected Bianca Cabrera’s pitch for Goals Genius as the regional winner.

According to Ms. Cabrera’s business plan, “Goals Genius is a SaaS web and mobile platform that is designed by and built for teachers and school administrators to improve and provide evidence for the required documentation in special education, as well as help proactively manage growth and accommodations for students with disabilities. All information can be transparently shared with teachers, students, and families to enable all stakeholders to support our students who need it the most.”

Ms. Cabrera has been a special education teacher for over five years. While her founding partner Craig Limoli is an MBA candidate at the Wharton Business School. He has worked in technology strategy consulting for IBM.

Goals Genius has already received the Social Innovation Award from Teach for America. If they receive the first place award through the InnovateHER award, they would have enough funding to complete the prototype.

Women Founders pitching for SBA InnovateHER

Hosting this event, allowed many of the women-led technology start-ups to be introduced to the company Inclusion. Saeed Jabaar, founder of Inclusion, volunteered to help judge this event. His nonprofit focused on educating more diverse communities computer coding. Ms. Cabrera at the end of the event mentioned that she intends to use his company to help fill out her developer team. She has said, “Diversity is important to me. My ambition is to have a more diverse developer team and to encourage more female participation in the tech field.”

Mr. Limoli remarked that, “The entrepreneurship course offered by Good Management & Investments has helped us put together the missing pieces of our business plan.” While other participants such as, Kim Bush of Baden Baden Bath House, used the course to formalize an idea into a working strategy.

After the success of working with the SBA for InnovateHER, GOOD is looking to hold more pitch competitions in the coming year.

About Good Management & Investments

Good Management and Investments was founded in July 2016 to fulfill the market’s need for low-cost affordable business consulting packages for new entrepreneurs. Its mission is to value human capital and productivity.

$70,000 in Prize Money rewarded by Small Business Administration for Women Entrepreneurs

Brooklyn, NY, PR Newswire

May 12, 2017 – Good Management & Investments (GOOD) is partnering with the Small Business Administration (SBA) to select local winners for InnovateHER. This local competition was established to encourage more women entrepreneurs in the United States. The event is held 6pm on June 2nd at the Co-Lab Factory (14 Dekalb Ave, Brooklyn NY). Eligible business owners are encouraged to apply here.

Contestants will be judged based on providing products or services that have a measurable impact on the lives of women and families (30%), have the potential for commercialization (40%), and fill a need in the marketplace (30%). They are also required to provide a business plan.

The local judges come from wide and varied background, but they all are focused on greater gender equity in the United States. Saeed Jabaar, the Executive Director at Inclusion, has volunteered his time to help assess participants’ ability to have a measurable impact on the lives of women and family. His company has helped dozens of people from low-income communities to provide greater security for their family through supplying in-demand job training.

While Busayo Odunlami, the Chief Operating Officer at Venture Smarter and a consultant for the World Bank, has volunteered his time to assess the potential for commercialization. He has helped educate hundreds on finance and his work is leading the charge for smarter cities.

Finally, Ebonique Ellis, the Chief Executive Officer at GOOD, will be assessing whether the product or service fills a need in the marketplace. She has worked with numerous small businesses across the United States to help them create added value for their company.

Good Management & Investments is also offering an entrepreneurship course that will help participants write out a business plan. Although, the scholarship period has ended, the course is provided for the low cost of $45. Students in the class will have the opportunity to write out a business plan that can be used for the competition.

About Good Management & Investments

Good Management and Investments was founded in July 2016 to fulfill the the market’s need for low-cost affordable business consulting packages for new entrepreneurs. Its mission is to value human capital and productivity.

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A small homage to Jay-Z’s inspirational track “Empire State of Mind”. His video was the inspiration for our mail campaign about our Brooklyn Entrepreneurship Class. Jay-Z’s rise to wealth is just one inspirational story from Brooklyn. Brooklyn has had many self-made millionaires from the projects including Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks.

Ask any startup founder about the challenges they face, and you’ll hear similar responses: obtaining the funding they need to grow, and gaining access to professional networks with the right connections. Enter SheEO—the solution created by businesswoman Vicki Saunders to help female entrepreneurs overcome these exact challenges.

As the founder of five companies, one of which she took public, Saunders understands entrepreneurship. She has raised most types of capital, but believes that the traditional funding model is broken.

The SheEO model asks 1,000 women, known as ‘Activators’, to contribute $1,100 each to SheEO regional funds. Of this commitment, $1,000 (minus the credit card fee) goes directly into a pooled fund, and $100 goes to sustain SheEO. The pooled funds are then offered as individual loans to 10 female entrepreneurs, known as ‘Ventures’, at a zero-percent interest rate, which is paid back to SheEO over a five-year period.

All Ventures are coached monthly and start paying back their loans after three months—in 20 equal payments—over the five-year period. Every quarter, they report on their business impact, and the results are viewable online to the public. Once the money is paid back (SheEO has a goal of a 100 percent payback rate), new loans will be distributed.

In an inspiring twist Saunders calls “Radical Generosity”, the $1,100 provided by each Activator is a gift, not an investment. By 2020, the goal is to get a million women in regions all over the world to gift $1,100 dollars each, creating a billion dollars of perpetual capital.

How It Started

In the summer of 2013, Saunders ran an experimental cohort to pair aspiring SheEOs with existing female entrepreneurs in an incubation and mentoring program. The success of this experiment led to the formal incorporation of SheEO in 2014.

In the summer of 2015, 500 Canadian women joined together as SheEO’s founding Activators. They collectively raised $500,000 to fund five female entrepreneurs building new mindsets, new models, and new solutions for a better world.

Over 240 female entrepreneurs applied for funding in this first round. The final five Ventures were selected in a simple online process, with every Activator eligible to cast their vote as part of the selection committee. The initial five Ventures have already begun to see success from their association with SheEO. To date, these Ventures report an average growth rate of 30%, exceeding their targets.

Helping Businesses Grow

It doesn’t stop there: both Ventures and Activators receive multiple benefits from their participation with SheEO. Activators support one another, do business together, and also become each other’s suppliers, marketers, and advisors.

Nadia Hamilton, CEO of Mangusmode, an app that helps people on the autism spectrum live their lives with more independence, has acquired dozens of new corporate sponsors since her involvement with the SheEO network.

Activator Suzanne Biegel says that participating in SheEO has put her “in an active relationship” with fellow investors and entrepreneurs. Biegel loves that SheEO encourages Activators to put their ”financial, social and intellectual capital to work on behalf of Ventures, not just when you write your check but throughout the life of that relationship, in a way that’s fundamentally different” from traditional venture models.

From connections and introductions to coaching and membership, SheEO is growing into a community of radically generous women supporting one another to create a better world.

Get Involved

There are currently four active Radical Generosity regions, and SheEO welcomes both Ventures and Activators to join the movement. In addition to Canada, current active regions include Colorado, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles. In 2017, SheEO plans to expand to many more cities globally, based on demand.

If you’re interested in becoming a Venture, note that the deadline for this round is quickly approaching. Visit the SheEO website by November 30, 2016, to learn more about how you can get involved. If you’re interested in becoming an Activator, please visit the SheEO website to get started.

Brooklyn, NY – December 2016 | Good Management & Investments (GOOD) is proud to be the 2017 winner of the CoLab Factory scholarship. CoLab Factory, started by Shane Barbanel, has had an incredible impact on the Brooklyn community and the world-at-large.

CoLab Factory continues this tradition by creating a new scholarship for women to offer free co-working space. CoLab Factory has also paired the winners with Lenore Champagne Beirne, an investor at 645 Ventures and an Entrepreneurship coach at Bright Coaching. “I am honored to be the winner of the #BuildYourDream Scholarship,” says GOOD founder Ebonique Ellis, “and to be among people who recognize the importance of entrepreneurship.”

Other Colab Factory peer is the social impact startup Propel, who secured $1.15 million in seed funding. The group of investors who funded Propel is primarily led by Chmod Ventures and included other key investors, such as WinWin, an investor group formed by Coinstar founder Jens Molbak.

About Good Management and Investments

Good Management and Investments was founded in July 2016 to fulfill the the market’s need for low-cost affordable business consulting packages for new entrepreneurs. Its mission is to value human capital and productivity. Their first business mailing address is the CoLab Factory space at 14 DeKalb Ave, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201 starting mid-January 2017.

To be ahead of your classmates and ready for life after college, it be a good idea to consider racking up your credit reliability while in college and not after. Building credit should start as soon as possible, so that you can have a good credit score after graduating college. The first thing you need do is open a credit card account. Now you need to have a way to pay for the monthly bill payments, so don’t just open account with no means to make money. A credit account is all about paying the card on time, because if you can’t, you are only hurting yourself. Holding down a part-time or seasonal job should be enough to pay those bills on time, and the job will make you look more reliable to your card holders. This is not to say a person living off of expanses or savings can’t open an account or looks awful in the eyes of card holders. But when you report that your employed, the holders feel assured that you have a means to pay them back.

So how should you advance your card score, once you have the card? The score naturally goes up as you show the ability to pay your card ON TIME. By two years of paying ON TIME, so when you enter junior year, you can increase your credit line. You have shown your reliability, and you get rewarded. You should be able to increase your credit line every 1-2 years, if you have a history of paying ON TIME. Meaning by Senior year, it happens again. It’s okay to spend money on your card now, and reaped the rewards which some credit card companies give for spending. Make sure you can pay on time. An easy way of doing this is having a savings account where you naturally put some money every week or month.

Your Credit Score will be Terrific

By the time you graduate, your credit score will be terrific. You can most likely get a new credit card with better benefits and features than the first. If you believe you are unable to pay two cards at the same time, don’t get it. You have time. The goal is to increase credit score anyway. Keep your attention on your student loans; they are also reported on your credit score, so paying them on time is also important. Check your credit score often, maybe 3-4 times a year, after you get out of college.

If your parents have a worse credit score than you, parental identity theft can happen. If you notice this, the first thing you should do is calmly talk them. See whats going on on their side, and try to negotiate. If it gets out of hand, though, law enforcement involvement is needed.

11.9.2016 News for Women like Farnoosh Torabi

“I find that in marriages where breadwinning women are really thriving with their partners … they actually team up with their husbands,” Torabi said. “I find that we forget we are in a partnership and this person sitting next to you wants nothing more than to support you.”

Women are sometimes tempted to do it all alone, but Torabi says that’s a “fast route to disaster.” She instead suggests women ask their partners to claim responsibility for important household tasks, from acting as caretaker to the children to managing the bills.”

“A lot of the guys thought I was just the cleaning lady,” says Hicks. She would often play along, not wanting to tip her hand. “I wanted to compete with the guys at first, without them knowing who I was,” she adds. Her commercial construction company did a little over $500,000 in contracts last year, and almost the same this year. She’s already got $1.5 million in contracts lined up for 2017.”